December 14, 2017

Unpopular Advent 2017 - Day 14

'It's All Over' from By Order Of The Moose by El Goodo

Nigh on eight years after their previous offering, and breezing in at a shade under forty minutes, El Goodo’s By Order Of The Moose proclaimed itself as 2017’s finest example of Let’s Pretend It’s 1968. Some may cast that award in a pejorative sense but I say it with the same warmth and delight that this record holds firmly within its grooves, for By Order Of The Moose is (deep breath) splendid bubble-gum psychedelic baroque Sunshine Pop. Yes, too there is a Western theme running through much of the record, as if Ennio Morricone were asked to score a soundtrack to Head and do you know, I would have loved to have heard ‘Sit And Wonder’ pop up in the equally splendid Godless. Wouldn’t that have been something? Now I wish someone would make some mash-up with it backing the epic shoot-out scene.

So ‘Sit and Wonder’ could easily have been my cut of choice for this series but then frankly so could any one of the twelve tracks. Instead though I am going to opt for the one second over two minute jewel of ‘It’s All Over’, a song apparently about the near break up of the band but equally at home being a bittersweet bubblegum Pop confection about teenage heart-break break-up that could have been concocted by The Hardy Boys or The Poppy Family. Equally it is a tune that puts me in mind of El Goodo contemporaries TV Girl, whose own de/reconstructions of Pop have delighted me so much in recent years. ‘It’s All Over’ is all girl-group dynamics soaked in cherry brandy, the kind of song designed for the dextrous tone arm lift-it-back-to-beginning of analogue lives or the hit-repeat button presses of digital. Either way, you want to listen again and again and again. Heavenly endings never sounded so groovy.